By Matthew Hamilton

Published 9:53 pm, Friday, November 8, 2013

Hedi McKinley recalled matter-of-factly this week the words spit out by the two armed men in black uniforms she faced when she opened the door of her family's Vienna apartment. It was 10 p.m. on Nov. 9, 1938.

"Where shall we go?" McKinley asked.

"We don't give a damn where you go," they shouted.

And so began the terror of "Kristallnacht" for McKinley and her parents, who were cast into the streets on a cold Austrian night without coats or possessions, as were thousands of other Jews in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. "Crystal night" was named for the shards of broken glass from windows smashed by rampaging Nazi storm troopers at Jewish homes, synagogues and businesses in an effort to intimidate and frighten Jews. It also began McKinley's journey to the United States.

Now 93 years old, Hedi McKinley will light a candle and read a poem on Tuesday night at an interfaith commemoration of the 75th Anniversary of Kristallnacht at the University at Albany.

In 1938, McKinley had been reading German newspapers at coffeehouses even before Hitler's army marched into Austria and had warned her parents that trouble was brewing. The persecution had begun, but still, the knock at the door and and what followed was a shock.

After Kristallnacht, McKinley stayed with a friend in the city while her parents found refuge with relatives.

McKinley had hidden a key to her family's apartment in her bra before departing and she returned a few days later to find the dwelling in shambles, with love letters from her boyfriend strewn about, furniture overturned and the elderly man who lived with them gone.

"They probably killed him," McKinley said. "What else would they do with an old Jew?"

McKinley took winter coats for herself and her mother, and she was later told that she was accused of breaking into the apartment.

"Hearing that the Gestapo was looking for you was sort of the kiss of death," she said. "You weren't going to fool around with that, so I knew I had to get out of there."

Her half-Jewish boyfriend, Heinz, took her to the Gildemeesters, an organization that helped many people who were persecuted by the Nazis to escape. When Hitler took over Austria, McKinley had gone to the British consulate and scanned phone books for Jewish-sounding names.

Her plan was to write to the British families whose names she found to say she needed to leave Austria and would work in their homes if they gave her a place to stay.

With a passport marked with a J, for "Jew," and her name changed to the generic "Sarah" that was given by the Nazis to all Jewish women — "It showed you had no name, you were just like a dog," McKinley said; "all the dogs are called Fido or something like that" — and a letter from the Sweet family in London offering her a job and a place to stay, the Gildemeesters gave her a ticket to London and, to her grim amusement, "$2 for the porter."

When she arrived in London, the Sweets put her to work as a maid.

She next tried to get her boyfriend out of Austria. A lawyer agreed to help her with one condition: they had to get married.

With a smile, McKinley said Heinz made it to London, but that they never married.

McKinley was eventually reunited with her parents. By luck, she found a message from them posted at a meeting place for refugees. They had walked across the border into Belgium and made their way to London.

"I have no idea how they got there," McKinley said. "Like many other refugees we never talked about anything. It was too painful."

With her parents, McKinley immigrated to New York City, where her uncle owned three rooming houses on West 70th Street. She stopped speaking German and took what jobs she could while attending school, which led, eventually, to her becoming a professor at the University at Albany's School of Social Welfare. She still maintains a private office for social work on Madison Avenue.

In recent years, McKinley has shared her story with students at local schools. For decades she couldn't do that because, like many Holocaust survivors, she found the memories too painful to put into words.

"Starting in 1992, when Hedi first volunteered, she couldn't even walk into the office. She told me it was too frightening for her to see posters or anything like that," said Shelly Shapiro of the Holocaust Survivors and Friends Education Center.

The center, along with the Jewish Federation of Northeastern New York and the UAlbany Judaic Studies Program, is sponsoring Tuesday's event, at which Holocaust survivors and members of the interfaith community will come together to confront bigotry.

A documentary, "As a Young Girl of Thirteen," also will be screened. It tells the story of Simone Lagrange of France who survived the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and then helped bring a Nazi war criminal to justice.

"This day, around the world, is a day of warning that prejudice can lead to genocide," said Shapiro. "What we want people to do is stand together against prejudice."